Remembrance
by ShadowSpires
Summary: After Order 66, Rex finds a way to rescue Cody, and remove his chip. On their way to the Rebellion things go a bit sideways.
1. Chapter 1

Rex honestly isn't expecting the strike that explodes stars across his vision. He lashes out instinctively in reply as he falls, his kick clipping his opponent's hip, but it's too late.

They were pretty evenly matched in hand-to-hand, always, but Rex has been on the run since the fall of the Republic, the rise of the 'Empire." Despite their best efforts they've all been eating half rations at best, and if nothing else can be said for the Empire, they keep their fighting force in good shape.

All that, and still Rex only goes down so easily because Cody has the element of surprise.

Surprise, because he should have been pumped with enough tranquilizers to down a bantha for a month — so, at least enough to get the high metabolism of a clone trooper through the next day unconscious while the bacta healed him and Rex transported him from the clandestine medical facility to a more secure base.

Surprise, because Cody's eyes are blank, his face twisted in a rictus of hate as he comes after Rex.

Surprise, because Nap already _removed Cody's chip_. Yet there is no recognition, no spark of _Cody_ in those eyes, despite the distinctive scar beside his eye.

Immediately after surgery, Cody had come to briefly, warm golden-brown eyes fixing on him blearily. "Rex?" He'd rasped, eyes flicking around hazily, not focusing well, but locking back in on Rex long enough for Rex to laugh tearily and say "Glad you're back with us, Cody," before they closed again as unconsciousness took him.

Now his eyes are _wrong,_ cold amber instead of warm gold.

They look like Sith eyes.

"Cody, what are you doing?" Rex yelled, heart in his throat and choking his words, twisting out of the way of the next blow, but the first was well aimed and Rex can fell his balance wavering, the blow to his unprotected head effecting his coordination, the followup blow to his thigh making him stagger.

Cody didn't answer him, didn't even seem to hear him.

What new, Sith-born devilry _was_ this?

Rex got a few blows in as well, but he was already compromised, and there was no recognition of pain in Cody's eyes or face. He didn't even falter when Rex lashed out. He felt at least a few of Cody's ribs give under the brutal kick.

Nothing. Nothing was going to stop him. He just came on, relentless, and Rex had no room to maneuver in the little sleeping room of the ship.

"Cody," Rex tried again, dodging out of the way of another attack. "Cody, please, stop this, this isn't you. It's me, Rex. Cody, it's Rex, stop this, come back to me."

There was none of Cody's efficient grace in the movements, only brutal force. Rex had fought against Cody countless times, sparred for fun and pleasure until they knew each other's moves by heart, until it was far more a dance than a fight, but that knowledge worked against him now. Every time instinct tried to anticipate Cody's movements, he was wrong. He took another blow. Each wore him down, his stamina not what it had been, and no match for a strength Cody had never possessed before.

What had been _done_ to him?

"Cody, you have to fight this, whatever it is. You know me, it's Rex, remember me, I don't want to fight you!"

Then a tackle sent him sprawling to the ground, and Rex just managed to get a hand around Cody's wrist before the blade of his own knife, stolen from his hip, slashed towards his throat. Muscles straining to hold Cody up and off of him, he stared into Cody's blank face.

Cody looked at him, but didn't *know* him, didn't recognize him, didn't know anything but the determination to see Rex dead. His weight bore down and Rex's strength gave just a hair. A line of ice sprung up along his throat – he felt the knife blade part his skin.

"Cody, please!" Rex begged, not able to kick up and dislodge the other, too thoroughly pinned. So he begged, but not for his own life. He didn't _want_ to die, not now, not like this, but he would not beg to be spared. He _would_ beg for Cody. For Cody's sanity, and life, and to prevent the inevitable, Rex knew, if Cody managed to come back to himself, to find himself sprayed with Rex's blood, found Rex dead at his hands.

"Cody, Cody, please," Tears choked his voice, even as his hands slipped more on Cody's wrist: sweat and fatigue, and no, no! _What had they done to Cody?!_ "You have to snap out of this, you have to remember me! You have to remember _yourself!_ "

Pain, hot and bright, liquid seared down the skin of his throat.

" _ **Riddur**_!"


	2. Requiem (Alt Ending 1)

Rex has been dead for three days when the deep, twisting roots of Sith magic finally burn themselves out of Cody's head.

There are no insects in space, to have begun the process of returning his vode to the components that made him. But even in the chill air of the space ship, the pervading smell of rot had snuck into the ducts as Rex's body started to break down. The bacteria in his gut, the small amounts in the air from the last planet they visited, it all worked towards what nature had intended of it.

Cody comes back to himself heaving, the too-familiar smell of a body rotting unattended jolts him from blank nothingness to full awareness in a blink, rocketing him from a dusty battlefield on Utapau to a small ship in the middle of nowhere with only a vague memory of Rex, in-between, leaning over him in a medbay.

There is a moment that would be panic if he were an ounce less well trained as he deals with the mental jarring of place, the utter blank between his memories. He looks around the empty cockpit, bewildered, heaving himself to his feet quickly, swaying when dizziness overtakes him.

It feels like he hasn't moved for days, like he's been subsisting without water or food.

But he'd seen Rex.

Rex was here, so everything must be okay.

He steadied himself against the wall for a moment, before striking off to go take a look around.

He has to find Rex, and maybe then he'll be able to figure out what happened.

~~

He finds him.

He wishes he hadn't.

Cody was raised alongside death. It is no stranger, following at his heels like a feral dog – half tame and all the more dangerous for it.

Sometimes it feels like he has spent more of his short life on battlefields than off them, wading through the blood and guts of his brothers, death howling it's discordant siren's song alongside him.

Yet he falls to his knees at Rex's side when he finds him, stomach heaving, splattering bile on the floor when his stomach will yield nothing else.

The worst of the bloat and rot of death has kept itself from his _riddur's_ body, embraced as it is by the frigid air of the ship. He almost looks whole. The gaping wound in his neck taunts Cody's folly, frozen floods of essential life wasted on the ground; crackled, desiccated blood a rusty halo.

He reaches out anyway, and the cold of Rex's body – always so full of life and fire – brands itself into heart, into memory and soul.

Rage tries to rise, tries to stoke the dimming fires of Cody's own life, weak and fluttering and shocked into embers, tries to ask _who did this?!_

But he knows, somehow.

Knows even without checking the security feeds, though he does that too, once he has lifted Rex's dead weight and laid him in state on the bed.

Watches himself kill his husband, listens to Rex plead with him to remember him, to remember himself. Watches Rex's blood splatter across his own face. He can still taste it, rusty and sweet with decay on his lips.

Watches, and does not even blink when the image stirs others. General Kenobi falling. Countless falling under the fire of his blaster in the name of the Empire. Rex's skin parting under his blade.

The chill space all around them is a forge fire against deep cold beneath his skin.

He presses one last button on the navicomp and returns to the cabin, standing over Rex.

He had considered the knife himself.

But he owed Rex a better end than drifting endlessly in the cold black of space.

He didn't know how long he stood there, before the ship started heating up, reacting to external forces the way Cody could no longer, even when the floor panels seared through his thin ship-boots, flesh sizzling.

Not even a sun was a good enough pyre for Rex, but it was all Cody had to offer anymore.

Notes:

TW for Suicide


	3. Aftermath (Alt Ending 2)

Jedi mind manipulation is rooted in the manipulation of a weak will. The will of another lain over your own, convincing you that their desires were yours. If you are strong enough in your convictions, if your will and belief is strong enough, you can withstand it.

Cody's will is not weak.

Sith magic is an entirely different brand of blaster, though. More insidious, more grasping and twisting.

But nothing, nothing is stronger within Cody than his loyalty. Loyalty to the Republic was a shattered and broken thing, destroyed by betrayal planted inside himself, held together by nothing but wisps of memories. Loyalty to his General had been stripped from him from beyond the reaches of his will, a chip planted in his brain, bypassing the input of will and thought, but now removed.

The complete overwriting of will and self by the biochip now sitting in a specimen jar was the only thing that successfully compelled Cody to fire on his beloved General. With that removed, the Sith magic – lain upon him as insurance against the survival of Kenobi but willing to turn him on any who tried to free him – stood alone against Cody's will, unbolstered by the chip.

There is no loyalty in him stronger than his love for his riduur, and it cannot be twisted, like the loyalty for a republic turned empire.

"Riddur!" Rex's voice comes to him as if through deep water, faint and distorted, slicing through the cold, but it comes, it provides the slim thread of a lifeline, a path for his will to forge along and he returns to himself with an outraged bellow, flinging the knife aside and howling his denial as he clutches his head and fights, driving the screaming dark from his brain.

"Cody?" Rex asks, and the hesitance in his husband's voice is a wound. He flinches away from the touch to his cheek, but looks down to where his husband still lays beneath him.

"Rex!" He dives forwards to press a firm hand to Rex's throat, trying to stem the alarming amount of blood leaking from the slice along Rex's neck. It's not the gushing of an arterial wound, splattering copper across his face, but it's bleeding too fast, too heavily anyway and _he did this._

Rex smiles up at him, and the happiness in the smile is blinding even as blood bubbles on his lips.

"Glad you're…back with me, riduur." His words come slow, and Cody's punched out breath emerges as a wail.

"No, Rex! Stay with me! That's an order, Captain! Rex, Rex! No! _Riduur_!"

Captain Rex's shuttle comes to a gentle landing on on the outskirts of the small country estate of a minor "cousin" that Bail had invented years ago. It was a useful fiction when he was younger and needed to escape the constant scrutiny of his position. Now, it is distanced enough from himself that his fledgling alliance can use it on occasion, and he'd offered it to Rex for the recovery of his friend. Commander Cody would be a wonderful addition, if he, like many of the other clones they have unchipped, wants to continue the fight.

Bail steps out to meet him as the gangway lowers, but his steps falter when he takes in the sight that greets him.

Cody walks down the ramp slowly, every step looking like it costs him everything he has. Yet he keeps coming.

Rex is cradled tenderly in his arms.

Bloody.

Limp.

Lifeless.

Bail must have made a sound, because Cody's gaze swings up and fixes on him.

Bail has seen grief. He's seen husbands and wives lose their children, each other. He's seen orphans, and people who have lost everything in their lives that made it worth living.

He's never looked into anyone's eyes before and felt the grief there was so depthless that it threatened to suck him down with it, threatened the sanity of both of them.

He wonders if this was what Obi-Wan felt, when he looked into Anakin's eyes and saw the Darth staring back at him.


End file.
